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What goes into a direct mail campaign? Behind the scenes at Gecko

With nearly 20 years’ experience of creating relevant, personalised direct communications for our clients, we know a thing or two about the best way to deliver an effective direct mail campaign. So we thought we’d share with you a little more detail on how we go about developing successful direct mail campaigns here at Gecko (we have kept back a few of our secrets!).

Developing a direct mail campaign

Develop a mailing listThe heart of any campaign is the mailing list. A cleaned and accurate mailing list of current customers is a goldmine for sales and marketing. However, your direct marketing campaign is only as good as your data! And it’s impossible to create a successful personalised, targeted campaign without clean data. If you would like any advice on data, our team of data specialists are happy to help.

Create a mailing pieceThere are so many different mail formats for you to use – from postcards to letters, to leaflets and brochures. The more we know about your audience, the more we can do creatively to ensure they will engage with your mailer, this approach can drive a higher response rate.

Measure your responseMeasuring the results of your direct mail campaigns helps avoid wasted spend and can also feed into learnings for future campaigns. Unless you have put some simple, tactical measures into place first, measuring the campaign results can be difficult. At Gecko we can support you during the planning phase to develop an end to end plan to ensure metrics are in place to help measure your activity.

Test the campaignSometimes it is best to test mail a portion of your mailing list and check the results. This can allow refinement for the main event further improving your ROI.

Run the campaignIt’s time to send. We’ll handle the dispatch for you, but be ready. When you run a successful direct mail campaign, recipients are engaging with you directly so be prepared to handle customer responses – the service has to live up to the expectation you’ve set.

Handling customer responsesYou will need to put some measures in place to handle an increase in customer responses and to also maximise use of the data you have now acquired. Is the customer journey suitable for your mailing audience?

Analyse the results of the campaign Analysing the mailing demographic, segmenting audiences and other deep diving into results is one of the most underrated aspects of the campaign. Continually testing and refining mail campaigns based on response is vital to the success of the campaign and for future ones at that.

Direct mail campaign services

We’ve got a wide range of direct mail tools that we can use to tackle your direct mail marketing challenges. If you’re looking for ways to contribute not just to your sales figures but to enhancing your customer database, give us a call to find out more!